Harden–Eulenburg affair

From 1886 Eulenburg was the young Wilhelm’s closest friend, and the “Liebenberg circle” that met on his estate was seen as an informal power around the Kaiser. Bismarck, after his fall, called it a “camarilla of catamites”, and he is said to have given Harden his first information. Harden, a Bismarck admirer and foreign-policy hardliner, blamed the circle for the Kaiser’s refusal to risk war with France in the First Moroccan Crisis of 1905. Who egged him on is disputed: Friedrich von Holstein, the “grey eminence” of the Foreign Office, is one candidate, while the historian Peter Winzen argues that Chancellor Bülow, suspecting Eulenburg of working for his fall, supplied the material. As the historian Volker Ullrich put it, Harden knew that nothing was better suited to provoke a scandal than the suspicion of homosexuality.

On 17 November 1906 Harden published a piece in Die Zukunft casting Eulenburg as “the harpist” and his lover Kuno von Moltke as “the sweetie”. Eulenburg withdrew to Switzerland, returned in January 1907 to receive the Order of the Black Eagle, and in April Harden resumed his attacks. On 3 May the Kaiser, told by the Crown Prince, demanded that intimates including Lynar, Hohenau and Kuno von Moltke step down, and the press coverage set off the scandal. Eulenburg denounced himself to a prosecutor friend and was cleared. In June Hirschfeld published an appeal against Paragraph 175 in Die Zukunft.

At the first trial in October 1907, brought by Kuno von Moltke against Harden, his ex-wife testified and the expert witness Hirschfeld declared that he had a homosexual disposition “unconscious to himself”; Harden was acquitted. In November Adolf Brand named Chancellor Bülow as homosexual and was sentenced to eighteen months; at that trial Eulenburg swore he had never broken Paragraph 175. At the retrial of December 1907–January 1908 Hirschfeld withdrew his testimony and Harden got four months. Harden then staged a lawsuit in Munich in April 1908 at which a milk dealer and a fisherman testified to youthful relations with Eulenburg. Eulenburg was arrested for perjury and tried from 29 June, but collapsed, and the trial was adjourned indefinitely in 1909. At the third trial in April 1909 Harden was fined 600 marks, and in exchange for dropping his appeal Bülow sent him a letter clearing his honour and 40,000 marks from secret Chancellery funds to cover his costs.

On 14 November 1908 Dietrich von Hülsen-Haeseler, the chief of the military cabinet who was directing the purge of the officer corps, collapsed and died of a heart attack after dancing a waltz before the Kaiser and his guests in the hostess’s tutu and a feathered hat, as evening entertainment at a hunting party held for the Kaiser at Donaueschingen castle. With the officer corps under heavy public pressure over the homosexual scandal, the army covered up the circumstances, and the Kaiser, already cornered by the Daily Telegraph affair, suffered a nervous breakdown. Eulenburg’s wife told Hirschfeld: “They strike my husband and mean the Kaiser.” Mocked as “William the Peaceable”, a coward, the Kaiser dropped his friends and turned increasingly to military advisers. Bülow, weakened further by the Daily Telegraph affair, resigned in July 1909. Harden claimed victory for having “broken the camarilla”, but later called the affair his greatest political mistake. It brought homosexuality into public debate for the first time while feeding hostility so strong that some spoke of an “epidemic of persecution”. On 29 November 1907 War Minister Karl von Einem told the Reichstag that homosexual officers should resign, and Hirschfeld kept some of those who turned to him from suicide. Convictions under Paragraph 175 rose from 1909 until the First World War, the Munich branch of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee dissolved itself in 1908, and the Wandervogel was denounced as a “pederasts’ club”. Antisemitic attacks on Harden and his lawyer, both Jewish, were fierce; the historian Wolfgang Wippermann notes the irony that in an age that branded Jews as soft and “un-German”, Harden turned that charge back on the homosexual courtiers.